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Seven years into a Conservative government and the NHS is in financial difficulty. Who would have guessed! It happens every time the Conservatives are in government, but it still comes as a surprise to some people.

Quite simply, our government spends less on health services than the French or the Germans, and, although our system is recognised as being among the most efficient, without money it can't provide the service most of its workers want to give us, and we want to get.

Before you point fingers perhaps you should read those articles I posted again. It is Labour who championed the PFI opportunities and admitted to putting in place poor contracts that are bleeding the NHS dry. But who cares, lets put more money in even if most of it will go to PFI firms. I wouldn't trust Labour with by Bells Whisky bottle of 20p pieces.

I didn't refer to your articles because they are not particularly interesting. As it happens, I don't agree with PFI as a model, but, unfortunately, it fitted with Mr Blair's view that the private sector had an answer for everything. I will say that what he did do though, was to impose a lot of targets on the NHS in terms of things like how quickly you would be seen by a consultant, as part of putting money into the NHS.

The money going from the public purse to commercial companies through PFI is significant, but only a part of NHS costs. There is no getting away from the fact that under this government the NHS has been fragmented as never before; more than 200 ineffective clinical commissioning groups were set up, and hospitals are forced to compete with each other even when cooperation would make more sense. Most importantly the amount of money going into the NHS is less in terms of GDP percentage than is the case in France and Germany. As ever, you get what you pay for.

When you add to that the cut backs to social care which means elderly people cannot get out of hospital even when the hospital has done all it can for them, then the only conclusion one can reach is that this government is happy to see the slow collapse of public services.

Seven years into a Conservative government and the NHS is in financial difficulty. Who would have guessed! It happens every time the Conservatives are in government, but it still comes as a surprise to some people.

Quite simply, our government spends less on health services than the French or the Germans, and, although our system is recognised as being among the most efficient, without money it can't provide the service most of its workers want to give us, and we want to get.

Before you point fingers perhaps you should read those articles I posted again. It is Labour who championed the PFI opportunities and admitted to putting in place poor contracts that are bleeding the NHS dry. But who cares, lets put more money in even if most of it will go to PFI firms. I wouldn't trust Labour with by Bells Whisky bottle of 20p pieces.

I didn't refer to your articles because they are not particularly interesting. As it happens, I don't agree with PFI as a model, but, unfortunately, it fitted with Mr Blair's view that the private sector had an answer for everything. I will say that what he did do though, was to impose a lot of targets on the NHS in terms of things like how quickly you would be seen by a consultant, as part of putting money into the NHS.

The money going from the public purse to commercial companies through PFI is significant, but only a part of NHS costs. There is no getting away from the fact that under this government the NHS has been fragmented as never before; more than 200 ineffective clinical commissioning groups were set up, and hospitals are forced to compete with each other even when cooperation would make more sense. Most importantly the amount of money going into the NHS is less in terms of GDP percentage than is the case in France and Germany. As ever, you get what you pay for.

When you add to that the cut backs to social care which means elderly people cannot get out of hospital even when the hospital has done all it can for them, then the only conclusion one can reach is that this government is happy to see the slow collapse of public services.

Clearly that statistic doesn't take account of what GDP is and how much per head that works out to. But on your data we are third in Europe and ahead of many countries that have reputations of having gold plated social care such as Sweden, Denmark etc. The article below suggests, or implies, that per head we only behind Germany. Unless the author forgot to cover the wide range of other countries that spend more per head, which I doubt. Im not disagreeing with you though, we need to spend more to be the best, but I still think we're right up there with the best. Hopefully, there will be more cash to go around all services when we stop being one of only nine net contributors to the EU that supports 28 members. But that money is looking like being at least another four years from being ours again.

Primary care where I live lurches from crisis to crisis. Until recently, you had an outside chance of a same day appointment if you went online at midnight or queued up in the rain outside the Medical Centre at 7am. They have now announced that samedays are no longer available. Now you have to wait for up to two weeks and even then it's highly likely to be just a telephone appointment of five minutes. Five minutes on the phone with a doctor you've probably never met and is on hands-free so you can barely hear what he or she is saying.

Most of the other surgeries in our area are no longer accepting new patients. I used to think they had a duty to do this but they must have changed the rules.

I intended moving out of London on retirement but stayed because of the Rangers, the pubs and the healthcare which used to be good. Now the pubs and healthcare are pretty bad and it's more of a duty watching the Rs these days !